Overview

Successful online training depends on an infrastructure of quality tools and technologies. With the appropriate tools in place, elearning opportunities can focus on the content of the course. Many expensive tools exist to facilitate online training; however, those high-priced technologies are unnecessary. By using opensource or inexpensive tools, organizations can offer free or cheap online training.

This proposal outlines the free tools we recommend for online training. We follow up our recommendations with a complete list of the tools we evaluated for this project.

Current Online Learning Options at ALA and its Divisions

ALA has partnered with ASCLA and the Southeast Florida Library Information Network to offer “online continuing education for librarians and library staff.” They contracted with Element K (a company that provides products, services, and technology for the development of learning programs) to provide online courses on technology applications. These courses are designed for library systems staff users, networking/systems staff, and “business fundamentals for managers and supervisors.” The courses are not free, and it appears that they are designed to be purchased by institutions rather than individuals. Those interested in learning more about ALA’s newest online learning endeavor can visit the ALA E-Learning website. The official announcement can be found on the ALA site.

AASL also offers “e-Academy” courses through the University of North Texas for a fee ranging from approximately $19.95 – $49.95 for members. Here is a current listing of course offerings.

PLA offers “e-Learning@PLA” courses, also for a fee of approximately $49 – $195 for members. PLA’s course offerings are “interactive and provide learners with meaningful and memorable learning experiences.” Participants in the courses “work with staff members from the Anytown Public Library and Tree County Public Library to solve real library problems.” Participants can collaborate with each other and instructors through forums and scheduled chat sessions. F

ACRL’s offers online courses through WebCT/Blackboard that range from approximately $135 – $150 for members. ACRL also offers Live Webcasts for about $50 for members. A full schedule and session descriptions are on the ACRL eLearning page. Other offerings from ACRL go through the company, Learning Times Network.

Recommendations

As a group, we have examined a few online learning tools that we believe ALA could implement and integrate for its own online learning purposes. We looked at Content Management Systems, Course Management Systems, Web Conferencing, and Live Chat tools. Our recommendations are based on ease of use, cost, features, and the number of participants that can be logged on or included in the learning.

Course Management System - Moodle

The Course Management Systems we looked at included Blackboard, WebCT, Sakai, Sloodle, and Moodle. We agreed that Moodle (moodle.org) would work the best for online learning through the ALA because it is a free and open source. The number of participants can include up to 50,000 students with multiple instructors. The site features include assignments, chats, choices (polls), forums, glossaries, journal entries, lessons, quizzes, resources, surveys, wikis, and workshops. Multiple-languages are included as well. It is an easy site to navigate and Moodle allows low-tech browser interface. WYSIWIG editing is also another feature that Moodle provides.

Web Conferencing - Dimdim

As for web conferencing tools, we looked at Dimdim and 1videoConference. Both of these tools had many similar features. Both were free and open sources in either their beta or alpha stages. Both are easy to use and students can participate in a video, voice, text chat and screen sharing web conference in both tools. We decided that Dimdim (dimdim.com) was a better tool overall as only the presenter has to download software (attendee version is browser based). The user can show presentations, applications and desktops to any other person over the internet without installing anything on the Attendee side. There will be a Community version, free, and an Enterprise version which will have a dollar price tag to cover a range of value-adds. Attendees can use either Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 1.5 as a browser. Dimdim supports internationalization so that users can see the messages and user interface in their own languages. The product has promising a good set of features: presentation and document sharing, audio and video sharing, application sharing, White board and annotations chat, polls, question manager, record and archive. Integrated voice and web cam functionality: working on making this bidirectional. DimDim is presence aware, and will integrate all major instant messaging systems. They're going for 100% transparency as a company, with code 100% open source, roadmap and technical documentation available online, etc., Collaboration Workspace popout, Broadcaster Floats, Improved Participants Panel, Chat smileys, Integrated Settings, Logout Urls and Simplified Publisher with Seamless Switching between shared content. Most importantly, this release integrates Moodle and Dimdim and one can schedule, start and join Dimdim Webmeetings from a Moodle installation. It’s a fairly new tool as it is still in its alpha stages, but there are lots of updates and the company is busy working through the bugs. Future versions will fully support Firefox on Mac, Linux and Windows, but for right now, Dimdim is only supports Windows.

Live Chat - Zoho Chat

We also decided that Zoho Chat would be the best tool to intregrate as a live chat tool. Zoho Chat (http://chat.zoho.com/) is a free, web-based chat service that can be accessed from any computer with a web browser. You can create groups of registered Zoho users and then initiate chats with those groups. Once a chat has begun, guests can be invited to participate via a unique URL if desired. Guest access can be turned on or off. Transcripts are automatically saved in chronological order and are searchable, but they can be deleted if desired. Guests do not have access to transcripts, however. Previous chats can be restarted by opening up the saved transcript and continuing the conversation. Zoho Chat also allows file sharing. It is unknown how many chatters there can be at this time.

Content Management System - Drupal & Joomla

Drupal (drupal.org) and Joomla (www.joomla.org) are two the Content Managment Tools we looked at for this project. The differences between the tools are minimal. With both CMS tools, one can add many different kinds of content/modules, have multiple RSS feeds, different users with various access, and many other things. These two tools have the potential to dramatically change the way we think about the web and the way we build online experiences.

List of Tools

We evaluated many tools for this project. A description of the pros and cons for each tool can be found on the List of Tools page. Links to specific sections are found below.